Bakunin, Mikhail Alexandrovich

Well-known Russian revolutionary, and often considered one of the "fathers of modern anarchism"

1914 - Born on the 18th of May in Premukhino, Tver Province, Russia.

1832 - Finished his studies at Artillery University.

1834 - Commissioned a junior officer in the Russian Imperial Guard and sent to Minsk and Gardinas in Lithuania.

1835 - Conceived of forming a philosphical circle in his home town of Pryamukhino.

1840 - Bakunin went to Berlin.

1842 - Wrote an essay The Reaction in Germany,argued in favor of the revolutionary role of negation, summed up in the phrase.

1844 - Went to Paris, then a centre for European radicalism.

1848 - Remained on friendly terms with the German communists.

1851 - Bakunin was handed over to the Russian authorities.

1857 - Allowed to go into permanent exile in the western Siberian city of Tomsk.

1861 - Left Irkutsk under cover of company business, ostensibly employed by a Siberian merchant to make a trip to Nikolaevsk.

1862 - Joined the revolutionary leaders AleksHerzen and Nicholas Ogarev in London.

1863 - He joined a revolutionary expedition that was to aid a Polish insurrection against the Czar.

1864 - Traveled to Italy, where he first began to develop his anarchist ideas.

1867-1868 - Bakunin got the membership card of the League of Peace and Freedom.

1871 - Bakunin was a strong supporter of the Paris Commune which was brutally suppressed by the French government.

1872 - Bakunin's disagreements with Marx led him for expulsion.

1876 - Bakunin died in Bern, Switzerland, on 1st of July.

His lifelong friend Herzen once remarked about Bakunin: "This man was born not under an ordinary star, but under a comet."

Page last updated: 8:20am, 06th Jan '07

"The instinct to command others, in its primitive essence, is a carnivorous, altogether bestial and savage instinct. Under the influence of the mental development of man, it takes on a somewhat more ideal form and becomes somewhat ennobled, presenting itself as the instrument of reason and the devoted servant of that abstraction, or political fiction, which is called the public good. But in its essence it remains just as baneful, and it becomes even more so when, with the application of science, it extends its scope and intensifies the power of its action. If there is a devil in history, it is this power principle."